Page 9 of Born into Mayhem
“We all show our love in different ways,” Sasha says before pulling on his own helmet.
“True enough,” I say, but my words are lost inside my helmet and then covered by the loud rumble of the motorcycle sparking to life. Gingerly, I climb onto the back, wincing when the hard seat is pressed firmly against my sore body. I’ve been hit a lot in training, and although this doesn’t hurt as much as some of those blows did, it’s a deep, aching throb in a very sensitive place, and it still feels very, very odd. The last thing I want is anything pressed against my newest piercing, so I tighten my hold on my seat and tilt my hips in an effort to protect my aching clit as much as possible.
True to his word, Sasha drives slower than I’ve ever seen him. It takes us a bit longer to get to his place, but as soon as he pulls up to the old warehouse he’d insisted on buying, I let out a relieved breath. Pushing a button on his key fob, a garage door opens up, and we drive right in. The outside is deceiving as fuck, because as soon as you get inside, the place is amazing. It had taken months of work, but the team of builders Sasha had hired were able to turn this into the most amazing home I’ve ever seen.
As soon as Sasha types in his security code, he opens the door and then steps in without me. His dog hasn’t completely warmed up to me yet, so every time I come over, we have to go through a whole introduction process. I try not to let my feelings get hurt about it. Chort was a guard dog for a Colombian cartel before Sasha rescued him, so it’s not like he was really loved on as a puppy. It’s created some challenges, but he’s slowly coming around. He no longer tries to attack Sasha, so that’s progress.
“Chort,” I hear Sasha say, and I can tell by his tone that the Doberman has destroyed something. It’s not an angry tone, more like a resigned one, peppered with a splash of disappointment. “I just replaced that cushion,” Sasha says, and then adds, “You can stop giving me that look. I wasn’t gone long, and you damn well know it.” After another pause, he says, “Yes, of course I brought you back a treat.”
A few seconds later, Sasha hollers, “Okay, come in.”
I step in, keeping my body calm and relaxed, no sudden movements and all that. In the corner is a chewed-up couch cushion, stuffing littered all over the floor, and enough puncture wounds to make it obvious he’d been at it for a while. Looking back in front of me, I see Chort happily gnawing on the bone Sasha must’ve picked up for him on the way to meet our newest niece. When I step closer, he stops chewing to give me a once-over.
“Don’t eat her,” Sasha says. Then he pats me on the head and adds, “Not food,” for good measure.
Chort lets out a grunt and then goes back to chewing. Relieved I’m not on the menu, I step further into the room. This place is an open-floor plan if there ever was one. Brick walls surround us, and there are a lot of exposed beams and metal pipes. A kitchen takes up one corner of the room, and another side is set up as a living room with a large sectional couch and enormous TV on the wall, but it’s the other side of the warehouse that’s my favorite.
A normal person would probably use it for a dining table, but my brother has turned it into a training area. His own personal playground, complete with lifelike dummies that hang from the ceiling rafters. He’d been disappointed that up close they didn’t look real enough, so one night we'd dressed them and he’d put black hoods over their heads. Now, anyone who walked in here would assume they were staring at real bodies, just dead and hanging in my brother’s house. Anyone who knows him wouldn’t be all that surprised by it.
Remembering the video I’d sent Dario, I say, “I can’t believe he said I let my guard down.” I turn back to meet Sasha’s eyes. “I didn’t, by the way.”
Sasha grins and walks over to the large stainless steel fridge in the corner. Opening the freezer, he grabs an ice pack and tosses it to me. Catching it, I carefully sit in one of his chairs and rest it between my legs. My brother and I have always been close, but we’re not so close that we’re going to sit around discussing my recent VCH piercing. I keep the ice pack on me, and we both pretend I just pulled a groin muscle during practice. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.
“He just likes to push you,” Sasha says, giving Chort a good scratch behind his ears before he takes the seat opposite me, stretching his long legs out in front of him. I didn’t get the tall gene, but I really wish I had. I think people would take me more seriously if I wasn’t so small. It’s hard to look intimidating when you’re less than half the size of the men around you.
“The man needs to learn to give a compliment,” I say, trying not to show how much Dario gets under my skin.
“He compliments you all the time,” Sasha says.
“No, he doesn’t. He rides my ass. Nothing is ever good enough, and he critiques everything I do to death.”
Sasha just raises a brow at me and takes out one of his knives. He lightly grazes his thumb along the blade, the barest hint of a touch from his skilled fingers, just enough to let him know if it’s as sharp as he likes them to be. Satisfied, he stands and spins the hilt in a practiced move that’s both effortless and graceful. I swear my brother was born with a blade in hand.
“You’re only paying attention to his words,” he tells me. “You need to look at his actions, his body language. He praises you nonstop, Mia.”
I scoff at his words and shake my head. “You’re nuttier than I thought, brother.”
He grins. “I’m not the one who just got my genitals pierced.”
Before I can think of a comeback, he walks over to the closest dummy and stabs it in an intricate pattern that would hit every vital organ and have a real person bleeding out in minutes. It’s the same move I’d done in the video—heart, kidney, liver, lung—a brutal attack that’s beautiful to watch when done right, and Ihaddone it right.
Sasha looks over his shoulder at me when I scoff and say, “You and I both know I nailed it.”
Instead of answering me, he stabs the dummy in the gut and then tosses his knife up so he can switch to an ice-pick grip before plunging it into the heart. My brother is ridiculously graceful when killing. He’s turned it into an art form, and I want to be just as good as him one day.
“Such a showoff,” I mutter, making him grin before he goes back to killing all three of the dummies in various ways.
Since I canceled my sessions with Dario this week, I’ve got nothing but time to kill, unfortunately. Grabbing my phone, I send a text to my dad, letting him know I’m going to crash on Sasha’s couch tonight. I know my brother won’t mind. If he gets bored with the dummies, he might go out later, but his place is like a fortress, no way in hell is anyone getting in here, and if they do, Chort will just eat them.
I also know there’s no chance of an awkward encounter with a random one-night stand. Sasha’s first love is killing, and so far no one’s ever been able to compete with that particular rush. He told me once that he doesn’t feel urges like everyone else. Well, at least not the normal sexual urges that most people feel. He feels something. I see it in his eyes when he’s training, and one time he hid me at one of the warehouses our Bratva uses and let me watch while he tortured a man for information. That’s a secret we’ll take to the grave, but I’d learned a lot, and I saw that same feral, excited glint in his eyes when he’d been covered in blood and carving the guy up.
So, he has urges, just not any socially acceptable ones.
Without meaning to, I find myself scrolling through my training photos. When I was younger, I made it so I could actually study the correct technique and mimic it when I was practicing at home, but now I take photos of Dario for the sheer pleasure of looking at them when I’m alone. Jesus, the man is beautiful. I stop on my favorite. He’s in nothing but a pair of black joggers, upper body bare and covered in sweat, knife in hand, visible veins running up his thick forearms, and a devilish smile on his face.
My clit gives a painful throb, reminding me that I’m not allowed toplay with it for at least a month. God, how in the hell will I ever make it? Scrolling through my hidden stash of half-naked Dario porn isn’t helping matters, but I can’t make myself quit. I should be appalled. The man is twice my age, but instead of disgusting me, it just adds that delicious bit of taboo wickedness that makes me want to climb his rock-hard body and beg him to teach me more than knife fighting.
I bet he’s a damn good lover. Hell, all he has to do is snap out a sentence in that sexy Italian accent and my underwear gets wet. The idea of him fucking some other woman makes me want to grab one of Sasha’s knives and take a turn with the dummy, but there’s nothing I can do about my jealous rage. Dario’s never crossed the line with me, never shown any interest beyond that of a teacher, and every training session is making it harder and harder for me to keep myself in check.
